CNET: Online-ad industry grows up

Only Nixon could have gone to China. Clinton was the president that finally had the opportunity to tackle welfare reform. And the Interactive Advertising Bureau is the only group that could promulgate a sane definition of the impression that could be accepted by publishers. In a reversal that took about seven years, the Interactive Advertising Bureau is pushing hard to get its members to adopt a standard definition of the impression that winnows out bot traffic and counts an ad only when it downloads to a page that a viewer might actually see. That may sound pretty simple, but publishers have so far been fighting against standards that rely on anything but their own rather generous server logs.

In 1997 the early efforts to standardize the definition of an ad impression online (as there were a surprisingly numerous interpretations, and they seemed to breed quite quickly) met with great frustration on the part of advertisers. One agency in San Francisco even had a media supervisor spending about half his time solely on this issue, attempting fruitlessly to bludgeon publishers into accepting a standard that seemed to buyers to be inevitable.

The Internet Advertising Bureau was then, as it is now, run by publishers, and several of the publishers on the committee tasked with the job of setting a definition didn't want to create a meaning that was too restrictive, effectively lowering the perceived inventory of their sites.

The new definition, which is split into international standards and U.S. market standards, has so far been endorsed by Yahoo and CNET. The IAB indicated it hoped its members would generally accept the definition by the end of 2005. The Advertising Research Foundation and the American Association of Advertising Agencies both endorsed the international standards.